Fonts

on a recent project.. i ran into some font troubles and learned some stuff along the way.. i’ve heard it again and again from various computer users… and on this particular project …when i was handed the eps files to convert to adobe flash files… there was a note that said oh.. by the way my system fonts are messed up… so i didn’t get copies of the font.. (side note: i prefer Adobe InDesign Files vs Quark or EPS files) and i used the font documented… well well.. the agency says it’s not just right. and they were right as the font i had installed as a bodega sans was actually an italian knockoff of the original that you can see here. Well this area of web design is often misunderstood and can easily bog down a work flow of a traditional print advertising agency moving to digital.. if you don’t understand fonts in websites.. here’s a quick primer just on digital fonts as the type face and font business is another beast all together where each font is copywrite to it’s founder and the foundry which produces it.
Digital fonts store the image of each character either as a bitmap in a bitmap font, or by mathematical description of lines and curves in an outline font, also called a vector font. In terms of how your website type looks you are dealing with several ways of displaying it. System fonts represent 90% of the fonts you see in websites and are given simple css tags to define the particular system font… what sucks about them is that while you may have a particular font, another use may not and they will default to their prefered font in the browser window.. this can be uncool if the font moves you text alignment and or sizes..

bitmaps
* Portable Compiled Font (PCF)
* Glyph Bitmap Distribution Format (BDF)
* Server Normal Format (SNF)
* DECWindows Font (DWF)
* Sun X11/NeWS format (BF)
* Microsoft Windows bitmapped font (FON)
* Amiga Font, ColorFont, AnimFont
* ByteMap Font (BMF)
Postscript fonts – Adobe
True Type Fonts – Apple
Open Type Fonts – Microsoft
Font Foundry
* American Type Founders (Kingsley/ATF)
* Ascender Corporation
* Berthold
* Elsner+Flake
* Emigre
* Font Bureau
* FontFont, a division of FontShop International
* Hoefler & Frere-Jones (H&FJ)
* House Industries
* Paratype
* T26
* URW++ (URW)

In Flash websites the fonts can be embedded as vector so that you may vary the kind of font you are displaying
[kml_flashembed movie=”http://davidawindham.com/media/fonts.swf” height=”600″ width=”800″ /]
[kml_flashembed movie=”http://davidawindham.com/media/draw.swf” height=”450″ width=”800″ /]